TLDR: My biggest regret was not switching to elixir sooner. I suggest following the udemy course by Stephen Grider. It’s a bit old, but it should give you enough to decide whether you want to make the leap or not.
I also came from node (nextjs + redux + mongodb + heroku) for many of the same reasons.
My current project is Elixir + phoenix + react + redux + postgres (for users) + arangodb (for graph data) + graphql inside arangodb. I don’t bother with absinthe, just send a POST request with a string.
For my own project I wanted something really performant, and the js crowd seems to think that js is performant because it’s async. But dealing with async was a huge pain my rear. Especially when you start using things like mongoose, where it uses it’s own promise library, but parts of it you can do with async/await (promises), but there’s the occasional undocumented thing in mongoose that ONLY works with old school callbacks… That lead to a great deal of frustration.
Elixir is more performant. WAY more. And its async system (processes) is WAY easier to reason about. Processes are also truly asyncronous, while the js event loop is technically just a highly optimized, yet synchronous system.
Then you have immutability. I remember the time I spent days trying to figure out why my array was changing by itself. Oh, you used an Array.prototype method on a different array? Too bad!
That is not an issue in elixir.
Or how about setting things up. Expressjs is awesome because it’s so lightweight and lets you roll your own stack… but eventually I found that to be its greatest weakness. There’s several different ways to do anything in node. When you look for help, you often have to explain your whole setup, and pray that someone had the same setup with the same problem.
Elixir comes with testing. I find it better than jest, jasmine, or mocha.
Elixir has a rails-like framework (phoenix). Built in CSRF validation and sessions, ORM, and an intuitive organization of code. Of course if you really want to roll your own, that’s still easy enough.
